[Rd] R thread safe

[Nicholas L Crookston]

> Is there any official effort underway to make R thread-safe? If so,
> are they looking for volunteers. 

I'm looking forward to the answer to this question!

> Would making R fully thread-safe
> really make that much sense given you can parallelize vector/matrix
> operations now (as you noted) which probably provides the most bang
> for the buck.

There are applications that could benefit from running several threads, 
yet not to accomplish the vector/matrix operations using blas. I thought
about working on this and have picked up several important comments from
this discussion. I have wondered, for example, if there is an option that 
a user can set to limit the number of threads (package multicore uses
an option to set the number of cores). It seems that we need to agree
on a few basic rules. If there are some already outlined, I would like 
to have a reference to them. If not, perhaps there is an 
on-going discussion on the topic someone could point me to.

> Thanks,

Nick.

Nicholas L. Crookston, Operations Research Analyst
Rocky Mountain Research Station
USDA Forest Service
1221 South Main, Moscow, ID 83843
Office: (208) 883-2317, FAX: (208) 883-2318
EMail: ncrookston at fs.fed.us